


Dynamite with a laser beam

by Mohini



Series: Ghosts [25]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Drug Use, Foster Siblings, Found Family, Vomiting, au foster care, tripsitting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:01:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24192514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mohini/pseuds/Mohini
Summary: There are things you just can't say. Better to offer distraction. It's her highest form of comfort, after all.
Series: Ghosts [25]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1100523
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	Dynamite with a laser beam

“You look like shit.”

“Mmmhm.”

It’s not the argument she’s expecting. Not even close. She waves a teasing hand across his face, trying to distract from the paper he’s glaring holes into. He bolts out of the spindle backed kitchen chair fast enough that the thing crashes to the floor.

She finds him in the bathroom, crouched over the toilet and hacking up the last dregs of the coffee he’d been working on at the table.

“Talk to me.”

“You read it.”

“I did.”

It’s not worth a lie to pretend she didn’t. She knows he hasn’t had contact with anyone of shared ancestry in more years than she’s been closer than blood. She also knows that the letter from some lawyer’s office claims he’s been given a laughable measure of an estate that didn’t give enough of a shit about him to keep him from a long succession of foster and group homes as a kid. The name and age of the dead old dude in the letter make it likely they’re related to the grandparents who dumped James on social services when he wasn’t yet in double digits. Probably one of the many relatives who was asked and refused to take him on. Doesn’t matter.

“Fucking sucks,” she says. It’s all that can be offered. There aren’t words for their childhoods. Not words that should be said out loud. Voicing them makes it too real.

He’s on his feet now, flushing the evidence away and rinsing his mouth at the tap. She waits in the doorway while he splashes water on his face, rubs harshly at it with a hand towel, and rinses his mouth out a second time. She watches until his breathing slows before she gets closer, keeping a close eye on the pulse point at his neck. She can’t see his heartbeat bounding away there anymore, and that means the hair trigger is reduced enough that he won’t swing.

“C’mere,” she tells him, stopping far enough away that it’s on him to reach out.

He shakes his head, stepping around her and striding down the hall to the sitting room. He collapses in a corner of the sofa, pulling his knees up and dropping his head to them like a little kid. Tasha runs through options. It’s been a long time since she’s seen him fall to pieces like this. She’s not altogether certain she has.

Talking is clearly out. There are things you just don’t say. Alcohol is a risky choice. James is and always has been a wild card there. Usually a calm, mellow drunk. Occasionally a little on the sad side. But once in a great while, he can be mean. Never to her, but still, not worth it. He won’t take opiates. She’s tried. They played with them plenty as kids, but he won’t let her feed him little tablets that numb everything down anymore. He hates amphetamines. Says he doesn’t like being so keyed up. That leaves benzos (probably the same risk as alcohol, though it’s been too long since she’s seen him on them to be sure) or her personal safest standby of little red pills from the cough and cold aisle.

Decision made, she retrieves several bottles from the back of her bedside drawer and combines them into one. With any luck he won’t asks questions when she hands it over. A quick check of her favorite drug calc app verifies that she’s guessed close enough. He outweighs her by better than double. He needs about that much more to get him out of his head long enough to come back down soft and settled.

She stops in the kitchen to fold the letter and shove it into the very bottom of the junk drawer. Steve can deal with it later. She’s not touching it again and she’s sure as hell not letting him.

“Jamie?” she asks on her way into the room. Startling a falling to pieces James is not a thing she’s interested in trying tonight.

“M’fine, Tash.”

“Bullshit.”

She reaches for his hand and presses the bottle into it. He cocks his head to the side and looks at her with raised brows.

“Seriously? What am I, sixteen?” The question could feel harsh, judging, but his soft eyes ensure it’s just one of gentle teasing. He knows what she’s trying to do. She’s never been good at comfort. Distraction though, that’s her forte.

“Nah, gotta be legal to buy it,” she shoots back. It’s a long-standing joke of theirs that she looks young enough that she even gets carded for that.

He opens the bottle and tips a mouthful of pills onto his tongue. Passes it back and takes the offered tumbler of water, trades for the pill bottle and shakes the rest into his mouth. A couple swallows of water later and he sticks his tongue out, the tip touching the space just beneath his lips with mouth wide.

“Asshole,” Tasha mutters. It’s a maneuver the group home parents required during medication administration. To prevent anyone from squirrelling away their drugs under tongues and between teeth and cheek.

“You love me anyway,” he replies with a smile. “How long will that take?”

“An hour, give or take. Maybe less since you’re empty.”

“You playing, too?” he asks her. The gods of good sense are a cacophony in her head of all the reasons that’s not a solid choice. She grins and heads to her room to grab more little red capsules. A lifetime of choking chemicals down in secret bids her to knock them back in the bathroom but she knows the rules, decided on when they were both still jailbait. Play together – watch one another dose.

She mimics his feigned pill check and takes the empties to the kitchen trash, burying them beneath the crumpled napkins and half hoping Steve won’t notice. A couple bottles of Gatorade grabbed from the fridge and she all but skips back into the room. It’s been a long time since they’ve been properly high together, and circumstances be damned, she’s going to fucking make it good.

Item number one, movie for coming up. A quick scroll through the streaming options and Bohemian Rhapsody is on the screen. She loves the music, James won’t ever admit it but he does as well. It’s one of the lasting effects of don’t ask, don’t tell. He has this strange need to only claim acceptable interests. And the rules governing acceptable are long and convoluted.

By the midpoint of the film, his skin is hot to the touch and there are tremors climbing up and down the muscles of his arm. His head is tucked into her chest and it’s only by way of knowing him as well as she does that she knows to reach down and carefully slide the prosthetic from his arm, rolling the protective sleeve off the end of his salvaged limb. The dimpled, pitted skin there feels tight and oddly smooth under her fingers, but the purr the touch bring from his lips is reason enough to keep moving fingertips along the grooves there.

“I love you,” she whispers to him.

“Mmhmm,” is all she gets back. It takes a minute to process that this is not the expected response. A minute more to realize that he’s stiffening up, that one side of his body is twitching hard and the other in nearly boneless.

She knows, academically, that this is okay. That she does this. That it’s fine. But the high and suddenly frightened part of her only sees her big brother twitching and barely conscious. She runs the math in her head again. Not quite double what she takes. He’s twice her size. The dose is right. Has to be. But, oh, shit. It occurs to her that she prefers to take enough to be really, really high. This is not an intro dose. Not a getting back to it dose. Not a playing around for a bit amount. It’s a lot. And a lot means she’s going to have a really high James. And she’s also going to be really high. That’s… not good.

She waits until he’s still again, eyes open and smiling at her like nothing strange has happened at all. “I’ll be just a minute,” she tells him, hopping gracelessly up from the couch and stumbling down the hall.

Bathroom lights too bright for already altered pupils. She flicks the switch off, not that she needs light for this little task. There’s a ridiculous little night light in the outlet at any rate, so it’s plenty illuminated to find the commode. Grab the toilet lid and yank the thing up, bend at the waist and jam three fingers back, hard. Cough, once, twice, and then it’s all red and pale blue. Half melted pills mixing with frothy Gatorade and stomach acid. Sputtering, drawing a couple quick breaths and repeating the process. Over and over until she’s certain there’s nothing left. Wipe the toilet. Flush. Wash her face. Still high, no stopping that, but not too much, not this time. No Jamie to watch over her. Her turn to watch over him. She used to know how to do this. She still does.

Back to the couch, stretching out beside him, on him, hands travelling over his chest and shoulders, up his face and tangling in his hair. Telling him she loves him, that she’s glad they’re home again, that she’s even glad for early ass in the morning lecture classes that bring her brothers she knew were lost.

“Hey,” he finally interrupts her, a finger to her lips, shushing the endless flow of words.

“Breathe, Tash.”

Even high, he’s watching out for her. Some habits don’t die. The music on the screen is getting louder, and the finale is afoot. He tugs her up, both of them wobbly and giggling. “Dance with me?” he asks.

It’s silly. She’s classically trained, good at what she does, did, whatever. But this? She does it in clubs. Likes it. But she’s not skilled at it. Not by a long shot. So they make fools of themselves, bouncing around the living room like they’re at Wembley, until one of them stumbles and they go crashing to the floor.

And that is the moment Steve’s infinitely shitty timing chooses to arrive home from work.

“The hell?”

“Hi!” James calls from where he’s still on his back, giggling and holding Tasha to him like a cuddle toy.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Steve grumbles, kneeling next to them and taking in the pair of them and their red, shocky eyes. If the blown pupils weren’t giveaway enough, the nystagmus would definitely do the job.

“James had a rough day,” Tasha supplies.

“Taaaassssha helped. Made it all bettah,” James adds unhelpfully.

“Did she now?” Steve asks, looking for all the world like he can’t quite decide if he wants to hug or murder them.

“Tash?” James asks, followed by a hiccup.

“Fuck. Help me get him up?” Tasha asks Steve, who obliges and half drags the pair of them down the hall.

She holds him up by the hair, whacking his back between his shoulder blades and telling him to stick out his goddamn tongue. She’s less than soothing, but she knows better than to be too soft with him. Steve is just outside the space, and practically twitching to cuddle the puking boy clinging to the toilet like a life raft. Lucky for him, Tasha knows better than to let him try. James has never swung at her. He very well might with someone big enough to fight back, and that would make for a much more complicated evening than any of them need.

She’s still high enough for the edges of her awareness to be just a little blunted, for everything to be just fuzzy enough to be fun and soft and okay. But she’s sober enough to know that trip sitting is absolutely not a job for Steve.

“He’s fine,” she says over her shoulder.

“You’re an idiot,” is all he replies. The look on his face says far, far more. It says he cannot believe he trusts her near his boyfriend. That he hates her for this. Just a little. Though she doesn’t know if it’s because this is a thing she can share with James that he won’t touch or if it’s because he thinks she’s a hazard. Tasha suspects it to be rather a lot more of the former. She whispers to Steve that there’s a letter in the kitchen he needs to read. Where to find it. And a few choice words of advice on what to do with it. He takes off, returns a few minutes later, jaw set and eyes hard.

“Fucking assholes,” he growls.

“M’empty,” James finally advises, and it’s Steve who pulls him to his feet, half drags him down the hall to bed.

Tasha fully expects to be sent away, to be tossed into her own bedroom and quite possible lectured like an errant teenager for her sins. Instead, Steve pulls back the covers and pats a space for her.

“Go on,” he tells her. “He’s all yours tonight, you fucking nightmare.”

The words sting, but the lips that kiss her forehead are soft.

Tasha queues up a playlist of EDM and cuddles close to her brother. Steve leans down enough to hug them both and whispers to her that he’s crashing in her room. She nods. It’s not like she expected him to stick around. He can’t stand to see her high, there’s no way he’s going to be able to spend the night with James while he trips out, especially now that he’s made it to the mostly incoherent place where he hums tunelessly to the music, pets Tasha’s hair, and occasionally whispers something about the colors and lights.

Tangled together in the bed, she lets herself drift alongside him. Colors, lights, soft hands and slurring words. Home. Safe. Loved. Even when it hurts.


End file.
